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Backyard Treehouse (Sandpoint/ Idaho)

Ethan Schlussler always had a childhood dream of building himself a treehouse bedroom. When he was 18 he sketched a few plans but college got in the way and so it was 5 years until he returned to his childhood home.
“A lot of people have dreams; then they get a job and have a family. And then they get to be 40 or 50 and suddenly realize all their dreams just fell by the wayside. I didn’t want that to happen to me,” he recalls. “Twenty years from now, I didn’t want to be like, Why didn’t I ever build a treehouse when I had the chance? I realized I had the time and the energy and the resources. So I just decided right there: OK, I’m gonna do this.”

Instead of bolting the structure to the tree he invented a clamping system — a series of 2-by-4s arranged vertically around the trunk and held in place by a metal cable.
To access the treehouse, a bicycle elevator was put in place to ride up vertically into the sky.